Global Scientometrics challenges the DIKW pyramid

Abstract

Society is moving towards Open Science. Open Science enhances reproducibility and transparency both of which are important features of research integrity. Scientometrics, the field which analyses scientific publications, has been criticised because of the use of traditional selective closed databases in its analyses. The present project wants to create a more comprehensive method to demonstrate the potential of Scientometrics to be able to visualise the contributions to research beyond subscribed databases in a more global, precise and complete way. Some studies have demonstrated there may be bias towards English-speaking countries in research analyses. Additionally, it seems that publications from some areas i.e. Humanities and Social Sciences research areas may be underestimated. The research community relies so much on publications included in the subscribed citation databases, they are the main sources of university rankings, research institutions, and the main source where researchers look for where to publish. This study aims to visualise publications beyond traditional and subscribed databases, Scopus and Web of Science. OpenAlex will be used as a complement to the analysis. OpenAlex is an index of hundreds of millions of interconnected entities across the global research system is a free and open source which uses data from Microsoft Academics Graph and Crossref. The database offers by far the most comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature than traditional databases. It also shows that offers a greater coverage of publications that are not in English. To calculate indicators, the study will use OpenCitations an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organisation for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It complies with the FAIR data principles that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. The publication window will be 10 years from 2013 to 2022. The study will show the influence of COVID 19 in the publication sample. How would research outcomes be impacted by the utilisation of new open data sources? Do publications that are not part of subscribed citation databases have an impact? Are there publications that contribute to knowledge even though they are not part of mainstream databases? Would subscription databases be able to expand their publication coverage in order to become more inclusive? By creating a fairer system for analysing and evaluating research this will ultimately benefit society as a whole. This project would be aligned with the recent developments for responsible research assessment i.e. DORA, CoARA. The originality of this project is it will be the first one done by an experienced scientometrician and this project will be the first one has been done using open databases to assess country’s research productivity.